A Storm of Blossoms

Chapter Three

The laceration in my shoulder was, as I’d expected, fairly minor. It was noticeable, sure, but it wasn’t a serious impairment. And while I didn’t heal as quickly as a werewolf, I was still significantly better than human baseline. I was guessing it would only be a few days before it was completely healed, at most. I didn’t even bother bandaging it, just washed it in the shower and put a clean shirt over it. Infection wasn’t a huge risk for me. Like poisons, infectious diseases seemed to have little effect on me for some reason. I did not get colds, hadn’t had one since I was a teenager.

It took time, though, and energy. By the time I was done, I was feeling tired. I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep yet, though, and ended up at my computer instead. Raincloud came and curled around my feet almost immediately, and she was absolutely capable of sleeping. I could feel her dreams flickering in the back of my head, half-formed presences much more pleasant than mine usually were. Even the tree spirit cohabiting with her seemed to be asleep, or something like it. I wasn’t entirely clear on how that worked, but he did seem to go dormant most of the time when she was asleep, and that was definitely the case now.

I spent a while working on a logo design I’d agreed to do for some Australian guy who owned a ranching supply store. He’d had a hard time finding someone to do that work, and now that I was halfway through the project, I could understand why. I wasn’t making much progress, but I was too worked up to sleep still, and too distracted and tired to do much of anything well. It was something to do with my hands while I calmed myself down more than anything.…

Chapter Two

Maddie didn’t take us all the way home, and I didn’t ask her to. She had offered to drive because she was making the trip anyway. She lived pretty close to the Blackbird Cabaret, in the same largely-abandoned post-industrial ghost town of a neighborhood. I was pretty sure she was there for similar reasons, too; it was quiet, and defensible, and there were no neighbors to cause a fuss. She had a meeting in the middle of the night tonight at Mark’s, the bar that was one of the other major local social spaces for our crowd.

So, she drove us there and then dropped us off outside the bar. Her need to be early for that appointment was obsessive enough that trying to get her to take us the rest of the way would have been a waste of effort. And it was only a few blocks from Mark’s to my house, anyway. Comfortable walking distance, and both Raincloud and I could handle the cold just fine.…

Chapter One

Attending a show at the Blackbird Cabaret was always a fascinating experience.

The building itself contributed a lot to that. Capinera actively refused to add permanent furniture, so you either stood, or you brought a chair or blanket to sit on if there was room at the event in question. The ceiling was open to show ducting and rafters from when the building was a warehouse, and the floor was open concrete except for a single, simple stage. The overall impression was an odd, surreal minimalism. It lent the Blackbird a sort of raw feeling, unfiltered and without any pretense.

Then you had the audience, which was its own kind of bizarre. Capinera didn’t exactly bar normal humans from it (though some of the individual performers did), but the crowd was always mostly or entirely drawn from the supernatural community. That never made up a large portion of the total population, but Pittsburgh had enough people to still maintain a decent crowd of us, and the Blackbird had enough of a reputation by now to draw people from further afield as well. I’d seen a lot of very strange people there, many of whom were barely even pretending to be mortals.

And, finally, there was the performance itself. Capinera was easily the most gifted a capella vocalist I’d ever heard, and those nights were so intense in their sound and emotion that I could barely tolerate being in the room for them. But most nights, she wasn’t performing herself, just providing the space for someone else. Those performers could be very, very strange, and unfortunately their quality was…not often on par with hers.…